My WORST Budget Tech Purchase - HP Proliant DL 380

People who are trying to learn about this servo DO NOT WATCH this video. There no where as loud as he tries to make it seem. And his lack of knowledge on the entire build will literally run you away from an amazing setup!!!!! Wow such a misleading video

For the DL380p g8 there is a ILO4 firmware that allows you to quiet down the machine. A 5minute google search would show you this.

The CPU cooler be like:
"Tell me you live with got cats without telling me you own cats..." ^^

I was given an old HP Prolaint tower case server by a friend. The howels like a Catapillar D9 bulldozer on full revs. Farken loud.

Servers are servers for a reason and not "consumer" grade. They are built to run forever, and because they are usually in isolated rooms, noise isn't an issue, keeping them cool is, so they are always loud.

I have 6 servers running TrueNas. A bit overkill, but I love them. HP ML310e Gen8 V2 (Idles at just 45 Watts), HPML350E Gen8 (idles at just 57 Watts), Two Dell Poweredge T310 towers, a Dell Poweredge 2900 (what a tank), and a Lenovo ThinkServer.

Do your editing and stuff on a WORKSTATION, then transfer your stuff to a server. You will be happier LOL :)

It's probably already been said but the reason your NIC is limited to ~100MB/s is because of windows file transfer protocol SMB. You will get faster speeds on Linux

You made so many mistakes!!! Your setup is all wrong, basically everything you did is wrong.

Someone didn't do his 1 hour research before buying a server

Sounds like we share similar flavor of insanity. I bought a 360p g8 as a second server for backups and testing.

The novelty of enterprise gear has faded. I still have the server racked and active but rely on WOL heavily to minimize power draw. It was a fun experiment.

This is really the worst use case for that server, if like me you host VM's this server is perfect for that, although I agree about the power consumption, especially from a house.

mine works great. less time writing a "script" more time doing actual work ??

I don't know why you throwed away 30 $ on tesla K20 if you can buy for like 80$ Tesla P4. That small card actually has gtx 1080 core and 8gb of VRAM and it has 75W TDP so it has no additional power connectors.

Only downside is that not have any video outputs and only way to make it rendering anything is having IGPU or some nvidia quadro and editing windows registry to make it render certain apps on Tesla and then display it via that IGPU or quadro.

this whole video is one giant facepalm

Yeah, you really didn't think it through..

without PCIE cards the fans very rarely spin up.

I got the fan hack installed, installed my drives on the outside of the server and switched the drive controller to HBA mode, and powered them with a spare PSU. Using Proxmox to manage VMs, and got 200GB of RAM for dirt cheap on eBay. Boot drive is using the robbed SATA connection from the DVD-ROM. Lots of workarounds, but it's a decent machine. Screw HP for making it so stupid though.

I see a significant mismatch between your server budget and the camera/microphone setup.

I'm getting a HP Proliant DL380 G7. Why? Because somebody's giving it to me. 48Gb RAM. Eight x 2.5" drive bays. I got a Dell R310 from this guy and he decided to give away the HP for free. How can I say no 😊

I owned a few used workstations myself and yes, most of them are really noisy. My biggest issue today is that the interesting machines - dual CPU with lots of memory - need a big power supply and they are most likely proprietary so you cannot replace a broken one easily. So I decided to keep away from used machines even if I get them from big vendors with good warranty and a big catalog of replacement parts. ( My company used over 200 blades once but shortly after the warranty period all blade centers but two broke down so we could only keep little over 20 blades alive. 180 fine Linux PCs broken because of some proprietary connectors to the outside world ... 200 cheap Linux towers would still run, or can easily be fixed with cheap parts ...).

A little late to comment but.. If you want dual Xeon's try a HP Z station or a Dell Precision. This is the route I took, very quiet. BTW I also have Gen8 and 9 rack mount machine as well, they are for virtualization. Last note, HP servers do not like any hardware adds if it is not HPE and will announce so by ramping the fans up.

You and I are going in totally different directions. I went down the server rabbit hole and have loved every moment of it. From a supermicro 256TB truenas server, to an HP DL580 G9 <these can be tamed if you put in just a bit of time and now a Gigabyte G482-Z51 for all the sweet pcie. Now I can have my cake and game as well.

ECC RDIMM is a type of hardware you wont get any time soon on consumer market :) only used enterprise :)

I relate so much, free electric so I've been buying old servers to cpu/hard drive crypto mine and it's been headaches and mistakes

DL360p gen 8 (SFF) + Dl320e gen 8 owner here. Though I am not a big fan of Hewitt Packard, I like these servers.

As you said in your video, yeah a lot of this was user error. I think a common misconception that people have in the hardware community is that a computer designed to be a server is a just a really powerful computer.

In reality, memory modules on servers and processors designed for servers work in a different way; they aren't just server processors because they have more cores, there is more that goes into how they are designed that are specifically targeted at servers.

You were looking for a gaming machine -- that's not a server, ultimately, was your core problem. Lol. Honestly, I think you would have done really well getting my DL320e. It has two harddrive bays, and an SDCard slot (I boot ubuntu on the sdcard slot, it is basically like having eMMC, and a laptop-size disk drive (buy a disk drive shaped 2.5inch caddy :p) for your minecraft server / storage applications.

Game servers might be a good application for the DL360p, but if you have 2 12 core xeons and a limit of ~760GB of LDRAM you would probably want to be like a professional game server hoster, at that rate. You bought a machine that is intended for running web-applications asynchronously, not primarily single-threaded workloads and graphics. Your first red flag should've been how hard the graphics card was to install, lol.

Also, ethernet ports have DRIVERS in windows. I don't use Windows, but it is obviously not a hardware problem if the hardware works on a different OS.

e.g. my 320e is an end-of-network server that serves API requests and DNS requests and my 360p runs a web-application's server that is served to a bunch of people. The hardware needs to be put in the right context -- it is like if you gave a bad review to a shovel because it was bad at raking leaves, because you wanted a rake but both a rake and a shovel are garden tools.


Cool video, but I would say it discredits these servers a little bit -- though I do think your intro provides some clarity on this not being a " server application by a deployment engineer" review of the server. Either way, thanks. Have a good day :)

in the dl380p g8, you can use a "silence of the fans" custom ILO, where you can ssh into the ILO and lower or even turn off fans, it works amazing, i have a dl380p g8 running in my room 24/7 with it
i see you talked about it briefly in the video, its a 5 min process

Please stop the incessant music.

Heart Problems

Like you said at the beginneing of this video you dont know what the hell you're doing.
'OMG i bought a data center server and it loud and the fans run'
you should at least remove the HP proliant from the title as it implyes that the server was faulted or not performing.

Thankyou, although still interested you stopped me from buying crap and banging my head for 6 months

A 2.5 Giga*bit* per second ( gbps ) transfer is 125 Mega*bytes* per second tranfer ( MB/s )

*clicks on video* *sees an hp gen8* *instant flashbacks*

With Gen8s you need to update everything to with the service pack iso using ILO, then update ILO and the newer firmware for things like the NIC. That will solve 90% of your issues. But for what you paid for those two servers you could have done a gen10 server.

Windows Storage Spaces a re e a huge improvement over the old disk management tool

I wound up getting 4 DL380E Gen8's for free about 2 years ago when I bought a server rack for around $50. Guy was getting rid of things due to his wife. I was planning on making a proxmox cluster out of 3 and have the 4th as basically spare parts. hope I won't run into any issues when I get around to actually working on it.

Hey its good that you realized that old enterpirse servers are not usually a good choice for basic things like serving files, media server, or editing nas. Even an ssd nas with a 2.5g connection will not use a large % of a quad core haswell cpu. Consumer hardware is much less of a headake when the workload is pretty light. My nas + media server is a haswell box. My firewall is a dual core sandybridge optiplex. My proxmox machine is a 2500k with some old laptop drives in raid running a security camera server and archlinux mirror. Only my remote gaming rig is x99, and only because i need all 40 pcie lanes for 3 gpus haha. My point is that for most home server tasks serving 1-2 users, you dont need enterprise hardware intended to serve 100s of users.

im gonna buy couple sever sometime in future. i think ill become tom cruise from ghost protocol after that.

Yeah DL360 is much more louder my dude buying enterprise grade hardware and expecting it to be quiet LOL


Bruh just do some research on it before buying, theres tons of videos...


You can go in bios and make fans work only whe nneeded, also power saving mode helps with it alot!


P.S. Only buy 360 and 380p if it says p at the end "stands for performance, they are just unkillable and better quality built + can run twice as long as regular one and e, i think e is the worst tbh

A high end used Dell workstation with dual cpu's is a good solution, such as a Dell Precision Tower 7810 Desktop.

You are so close with your storage server. The fan control firmware is awesome. For networking I’d get a used 10gig LOM card and a used pci 10gig nic for your desktop. Truenas runs great on it. A lot of people run proxmox or esxi to combine Truenas and render VMs into one box. I keep my proxmox and Truenas on separate servers. With persistence I’ve overcome everything but the slow boot times. Hope your able to revisit you home lab one day, good luck!

Short answer is use Proxmox or VMWare as an ESI host as a type 1 Hypervisor.

Think you need to learn more about virtualization so you can scale down your physical hardware footprint. Seems like you focused on using these as a physical servers. Install like Proxmox passthrough your drives to a Truenas VM and then pass through a GPU to a Windows VM or use it for Plex. You could also use some of your extra network adapters and virutalize a PFSense or another virtualizable firewall and bam you have a hyper-converge setup.

PROXMOX

i'm using ml350p gen8 and it works well with my RTX 2070 and pcie nvme adapter(cant boot on it, but see drive) with 2* xeon e5 2680 v2 bought 40€ and 256gb ddr3 1866 bought 140€, so it's budget, works well on most games but consumes a lot more power and the fan isn't too noisy, but definetly more noisy than my gf computer with fx 9590 ;)

I got my dual cpu rack server kicks with a dell poweredge r720! Working well as my unraid server but yea its noisy too but i already knew it would be from the dell poweredge r410 it replaced lol

I'm subscribing just for the honesty. LOL

Let me know what you want to know. I’m running hp dl380 g8’s with unraid. E5-2697 v2’s. Seen one with a 2080 super in it. You can run ssds but remember the controller is not designed for that. Sas drives are cheap and enterprise grade. I put mine in the basement to cut down on noise. I remote into my windows 11 server and done. Further I can go to wherever, remote into home, convert whatever I need and send it to myself. You are on the right track!

For any kind of specialized hardware always do research! This video caught my eye since I actually bought a similar model a month back, am using it for docker game hosting. Running on Ubuntu server headless and running Factorio, 7dtd, ark, satisfactory, valheim, space engineers, avorion, and a few mc servers including direwolf. Plus storage. Running smoothly and quiet as a bug in a rug while servers are running. But to do that I had to make sure everything I smacked in there was hpe certified. And before I did any of that I made sure the platform would actually do what I wanted. Great video!

I understand you and geeking with this stuff, but why not just buy a Synology nas 😁 or buy a small form factor hp elitedesk or thinclient (mini pc)

I picked up a GL360p yesterday for $50 and this popped up in my feed today.